I drove up to Casper the day before (4h) and parked the station-wagon in the Walmart parking lot, then went up on the top of Casper Mountain facing west very early. It was incredible. I can't imagine all the poor folks stuck in town to watch it.

You may hear about the star-studded black bowl with a 360° sunset or even see pictures, but nothing in the world prepares you for the wrath-of-God–sized wall of darkness that comes rushing at you from out of the west at more than twice the speed of sound as if it were some silent shockwave from a dinosaur-extinction event, followed by an impossibly black sun that you can look at with your bare eye like some hole torn from space itself which leads to uttermost annihilation.

Speaking of bats, a friend once took me at dusk out to a hillside in South Dakota where he cast a fake lure (no hooks) into a cloud of swirling bats to see if they'd "hit" it. Their echo location is so good that they'd start to make for the lure and then veer off because they could tell it wasn't a real insect.

When my kids were born I toyed with the idea of videotaping the event, but decided I wanted to be there for it. It was a good choice. I can truly say it was the most stunning event of my life. I'd have missed it from behind a viewfinder.

Human languages can be so different, yet the similarities can be remarkable. Imagine the language of an alien species, how utterly foreign it would be. I recall a short story by Ursula LeGuin about ants that wrote poetry in chemical markers. Obviously she had that same thought.

But just as English is Germanic with a whole lot of Latin/Romance imports, and Rumanian is Romance with a whole lot of Slavic imports, I gather that Persian is Indo-European with a whole lot of Arabic imports. I know nothing.

@tchrist I am Strava buddies with a Brazilian woman who lives in Manhattan. I can sometimes fathom her Portuguese comments by running them through my Spanish filter, but just as often I don't get them at all.

The Persian language has six vowel phonemes and twenty-three consonant phonemes. It features contrastive stress and syllable-final consonant clusters.
== Vowels ==
Word-final /o/ is rare except for تو‎ ту /to/ ('you' [singular]), loanwords (mostly of Arabic origin), and proper and common nouns of foreign origin, and word-final /æ/ is very rare in Iranian Persian, an exception being نه‎ на /næ/ ('no'). The word-final /æ/ in Early New Persian mostly shifted to /e/ in contemporary Iranian Persian (often romanized as ⟨eh⟩, meaning [e] is also an allophone of /æ/ in word-final position in contemporary...

@Færd One advantage non-English speakers have is that there are some obvious languages to learn, like English itself. English speakers are unlikely to learn Farsi unless they work for the State Department or have Iranian relatives or what have you.

Let's say I rent a property for $1,000 a month.
If it is now June, my expected income thru the end of the year is $6,000.
But the contract will end prematurely at the end of September. Which means that three months of the rest of the year, which could have earned me $3,000, will not.
What is t...

Gotcha. Instead of "or exam to me", I would write "and this is not an exam". Then to keep it blunt, I would go as short and direct as possible. My rewrite would be: "You are not my professor, and this is not an exam, so I can use any language I want."

This is something that has bothered me for a while and probably the answer is something really simple. Nevertheless. In their depiction of evil, mainstream Hollywood films often humanize their villains. They often offer the audience some explanation of why a person turned to his/her evil ways (so...

I am looking for a word that means "Word that means willing to accept whatever is given, not being forthright to tell someone what to do, aeven if nothing is given"
It is an adjective.
Example
"I'm having trouble thinking of a new conversational topic today. We've spoken for hours. I should...